A Dark Anniversary in Afghanistan

Friday, December 31, 2004

By Jean MacKenzie

Amid the bells and baubles of the holiday season, few in the West will pause to mark one of the year's darker anniversaries. Twenty-five years ago this month, the Red Army invaded Afghanistan, opening a Pandora's box whose effluvia include Osama bin Laden and leader of the Taliban Mullah Omar.

Afghanistan has largely slipped from the collective consciousness since the U.S. bombing of 2001, which toppled the Taliban and brought a precarious, internationally enforced peace. But, as centuries of history have shown, it is dangerous to underestimate this turbulent land, whose mountains have swallowed the ambitions of more than one great power.

The events leading up to the Christmas attack were as banal as they were brutal: In April 1978, Afghan President Mohammed Daoud, along with his entire family, was murdered in a military coup. Sympathy for the martyred Daoud can be tempered by the fact that he had gained power by throwing his cousin, King Zahir Shah, off the throne five years earlier.

Daoud was replaced by Noor Mohammed Taraki, a Moscow-friendly thug representing the more radical wing of the Afghan Communist Party. Taraki instituted a series of highly unpopular reforms that provoked rebellion and led to his murder in September 1979. Next at bat was the more moderate, if largely ineffectual communist, Hafizullah Amin. The hapless Amin had just three months to enjoy his preeminence, before he, in turn, fell to a Soviet-orchestrated coup.

The whys of the Soviet incursion are still being debated: a desire for warm water ports? A fear of Islamic radicalism on its southern flank? A helping hand to a communist regime in trouble?

Whatever the reasons, the facts are clear: The Soviet Army began inserting operatives into Afghanistan on Christmas Eve, 1979. By Dec. 27, they had completed their first phase; they disposed of Amin and installed a more compliant Babrak Karmal as head of state. On the surface a short, successful operation, but it would take another 10 bloody years before the Soviets admitted defeat.

We all know the legend: Soviet soldiers and their Afghan proxies, backed by a mighty superpower military machine, could not subdue the brave, bearded mujahedin, waging a desperate jihad to save their land from the communist infidel. But those legendary mountain men were on a generous allowance from Uncle Sam, and their donkey carts often concealed missiles provided by the Americans or their Pakistani proxies.

By the time the last Soviet tank had slunk back up the Salang Highway toward Russia in 1989, millions of Afghans were dead and half the population displaced. More than 15,000 Soviet soldiers had been killed, countless more injured. The Soviet Union itself would crumble in just two years. The United States, having aided in the humiliation of its Cold War rival, grew bored with the mujahedin, until the collapse of the World Trade Center's twin towers brought Afghanistan back onto center stage.

But it was in Afghanistan in the 1990s that the events of Sept. 11 originated. While the Americans focused on domestic sex scandals and the Russians tried to build a viable country out of Soviet flotsam, Kabul tried to clean up the mess the superpowers had left behind.

The mujahedin morphed into avaricious warlords. Generals like Ahmed Shah Massoud, Rashid Dostum, or the American darling Gulbuddin Hekmetyar, battled among themselves for power and gain, reducing much of Afghanistan to rubble in the process.

From the Pashtun-dominated south came a movement of religious students known as the Taliban, determined to rout the warlords and return the country to Islamic purity. They were partially successful, and a regime even more repressive came to power, driving women under the burqa, banning photographs and kite flying, and holding public executions of sinners in the central sports stadium in Kabul.

The Taliban found a soul mate in a deep-pocketed Saudi who had been driven out of his own country for his radical views. Osama bin Laden found shelter and succor in Afghanistan; he was allowed to run his training camps and plan his attacks from mountain strongholds in the wilds between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

In September, 2001, he struck. When the Taliban refused to give bin Laden up to American justice, the bombs began to fall. Once the dust had cleared, the United States and its allies set about molding Afghanistan into an acceptable partner.

But Afghanistan is no more likely to yield to its new conquerors than it was to the old.

Kabul today has little about it that suggests a functioning capital city. Electric power can best be described as sporadic, the water is toxic and the air heavy with what is charmingly described as "fecal dust." Life in the provinces is harsher still. Aid workers in rural Afghanistan often head to Kabul for some much needed R and R.

Despite hardship, the Afghan people are proud, gracious, hospitable and warm. But there is violence just under the surface, which lends even the most casual relationships an air of danger.

A stroll down Chicken Street, for instance, is a delightful way to spend a Saturday afternoon. Numerous carpet sellers beckon you into their shops; in other doorways, fur coats and buzkashi whips alternate with embroidered wall hangings and hookah pipes. It is a popular spot for foreigners, at least until the suicide bombing in October, which killed a young Afghan girl and an American woman, in addition to the bomber himself.

I cannot resist the lure of the shops, but every time a figure in a burqa grabs my hand asking for "baksheesh," I can't help but wonder if she has a belt of plastic explosives under her sky-blue robes.

I have a friend, Mirwais, who works as a guard in our house. One evening he and I were watching "Osama," an Afghan movie, which highlighted the atrocities of the Taliban years. I watched the film in open-mouthed horror, while Mirwais sat giggling on the other side of the room.

Mirwais, it turns out, had been a black-turbaned student in Kandahar, the seat of the Taliban. This gentle soul, to whom I entrust my possessions and my life, is a fan of some of the less appetizing practices of the Taliban years, like cutting off the hands of thieves. My predictable American take is that this is barbaric; his is that it cuts down admirably on recidivism.

"Americans are children," he said, smiling indulgently. "When I first came from Kandahar, I thought I would kill the first American I saw. But now I see that they can be good people, too." I smiled back, but inside I squirmed. I do hope Mirwais' sentiments have changed permanently.

Those of us spearheading the current aid worker invasion would do well to remember the lessons of Christmas past. Afghanistan absorbs unthinkable levels of punishment and keeps on going. It is the would-be Goliath who, as often as not, lies broken at the close of play. And in Afghanistan today there is no shortage of slingshots.

Jean MacKenzie is director of training for the Institute for War and Peace Reporting in Afghanistan. She contributed this comment to The Moscow Times.